Writing in the British Financial Times on last
September 27, Geoff Dyer and Najmeh Bozorgmehr expected the US -- Iran rapprochement to "be one of
the biggest geopolitical shifts since the cold war."

The US -- led military invasion of Iraq in 2003
pragmatically but counterproductively made the best use of the Iranian vengeance,
which was in the waiting for whatever window of opportunity might open to
revenge the ceasefire in the eight -- year Iran -- Iraq war, which the late leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of
Iran (IRI) , Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
lamented as " gulping the cup of poison."

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In hindsight, it is very clear now that Iran similarly made
its best to violate the ceasefire with Iraq and facilitate the US war on Iraq
as a continuation of the Iranian war by proxy; while American soldiers were
dying by the thousands and Washington was depleting its budget by billions of
tax-payer money spent on its war on Iraq, Iran was reaping the US harvest there
quietly but persistently.

When the last of the US troops withdrew from Iraq late in
2011, they left behind in Baghdad a US -- engineered "peace process" led by the
same US -- nurtured Iraqi "opposition" whom the US invading troops installed in
power eight years earlier, ignoring the fact that this was the same
"opposition" nurtured by Iran for a longer period all throughout the more than
three decades of late Saddam Hussein rule, who never severed their loyalty to
Iran during the US occupation of Iraq.

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The real loyalty of the Iraqi rulers to either the US or Iran was blurred until the Syrian
conflict made it impossible for them to continue publicly undecided.

US Ambivalent

Until recently, Iraq under PM al-Maliki was posturing
as tactically placating Iran
on Syria while committing
quietly to its Strategic Framework Agreement
(SFA) , which al-Maliki signed with the
former US
president George W. Bush on December 14. 2008.

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Al-Maliki's government was on record in its support of a
political negotiated settlement of the Syrian conflict and against any military
solution thereto as well as in its opposition to "foreign intervention" in
Syria, US strike whether "limited" or unlimited against it, arming Syrian
rebels or facilitating their mission with logistics, Arab League's suspension
of its membership, imposing unilateral Arab, US and EU sanctions on the
country, and Arab League's and US president Barak Obama's calls for Syrian
president Bashar al-Assad to "step down," thus allying itself with the Russia, China and Iran.